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Question
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Many years ago I remember reading a potted biography of my ancestor, Stephen Neate of All Cannings, and I have a painting of the family coat of arms (presumably his) made by my grandmother. Have you any information on Stephen Neate and on what I seem to recall was an active role in public life?
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Question asked on
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04 July 2011
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Answer
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Burke's 'General armory', last published in 1884, has a blazon (a description of the coat of arms) for the Neates of Swindon and London, which corresponds with your grandmother's painting, allowing for a little artistic licence. The blazon is 'argent, a chevron between two trefoils in chief vert and a bull's head couped at the neck in base gules, horned and crined or'. Argent is the background colour of silver or white; the chevron (no colour indicated but it could be red, black, blue or green) is an inverted vee-shaped bar. The green trefoils are simply stylised three-leaf motifs, like clover-leaves, and are in the upper part of the shield; the bull's head - red with yellow horns and tufting between them - is in the bottom part of the shield. The crest - 'a bull's head couped at the neck gules, amred and crined or, between two dragons' wings expanded vert' - repeats the bull's-head motif, but with white horns and tufting. 'Neat' is an old word for a cow, bull or ox, so the use of a bull's head in the arms is a pun. It is possible, then, that the Stephen Neate recorded as a farmer in Berwick Bassett in Kelly's Directory, 1848, had connections with the armigerous Neates of Swindon, ten miles to the north. Similarly, it is possible that this Stephen Neate is to be associated with the farmer of All Cannings, who is listed in Kelly's Directory in 1855, 1859 and 1867, latterly at Manor Farm. There is no further reference to him, and he is unlikely to be the Stephen Richmond Neate who inherited a farm in Marden in 1837 by marriage, and by 1867 (but not before) is recorded in Kelly's as a private resident.
There is no reference to either of these Stephen Neates, nor to Stephen Young Neate, the son of Stephen Richmond Neate of Marden, in any of the biographical sources, such as Boase's 'Modern English Biography' (1892, supplement 1908) or Walford's 'County families of the United Kingdom' (1891). We have no nineteenth-century editions of Burke's 'Landed Gentry', but this directory was first published from 1833, and was issued throughout the nineteenth century at four- or five-yearly intervals. If you could track down a run of these - perhaps at the British Library, or at the library of the Society of Genealogists in London - you might be able to find the reference to your ancestor. To make the connection from your mother and grandmother to Stephen Neate, and thence to the armigerous Neates, you will have to trace your family history in a systematic way, and how to do so is described in Wiltshire History Question no. 271, which you will find by a search on 'certificates' in the query box below at the left. It may be that the connection with the armigerous Neates predates civil registration. The International Genealogical Index lists over 900 Neates/Neats in Wiltshire. However, there is no reference, apart from a late eighteenth-century pair of Stephen Neates being baptised at All Saints', All Cannings, and Stephen Richmond Neate's marriage to the heiress Elizabeth Susannah Young on 21 February 1829 at All Saints', Marden, which is obviously, or even possibly, relevant to your concerns.
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Bibliography
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VCH Wiltshire vol. 10 (1975), p. 121.
Burke, Sir B.: General armory (London: Heraldry Today, 1984 - facsimile of 1884 ed.)
